India, China, Russia, Vietnam. This is how the Burmese junta is forging new alliances following the coup

Bangkok. “Talking to the dead”. For Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s architect and one of the founding fathers of Neo-Confucianism, it was like attempting to engage in dialogue with the Burmese generals. Twenty years on, the dead have been reincarnated and many are now conversing with them. This resurrection began in December 2025, the year which, according to many analysts, was supposed to mark the collapse of the regime. That month saw the first phase of the grotesque elections, which were to conclude in January with a landslide victory for the military party. Thus, as predicted by the soothsayers who serve as the generals’ secret advisers, on 3 April the new Parliament elected General Min Aung Hlaing – the architect of the 2021 coup and leader of the junta that has ruled the country – as president. To take his place as commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw, the armed forces, the ‘president’ appointed his staunchest loyalist, Ye Win Oo, formerly head of intelligence and responsible for torture, rape and the murder of political prisoners. The man who arrested Aung San Suu Kyi.

The new administration does not represent a political transition. It is a consolidation of military power within a constitutional framework they have themselves devised. An example of this is the photograph of the meeting between the representative of the International Red Cross and Aung San Suu Kyi, which took place on 3 August. She appears subdued, without the frangipani flower in her hair that was her trademark. That photograph, it has been said, “is proof of life, not of change”. She seems destined to remain one of the twenty thousand political prisoners, but that photograph was enough to satisfy the demands of many governments. The “charm strategy” has been successful. In late May, India hosted Min Aung Hlaing; in June, China; and in July, Laos. In August, it was Thailand’s turn, first with a meeting between the new president and Thai Prime Minister Anutin, then between the commander of the Thai Armed Forces and his Burmese counterpart. Around the same time, Aung Hlaing was received in Moscow by Vladimir Putin. September began with a visit to a defence and telecommunications company in Vietnam and a meeting with the country’s leader, Tom Lam. A few days later, Min Aung Hlaing flew to Cambodia, where he met the former leader, Hun Sen, and the current Prime Minister, his son Hun Manet.

All these meetings are justified by mutual interest. For China, Russia and India, Myanmar is ‘the eye of the Buddha’, the centre of any geopolitical plan in the Indo-Pacific. In exchange for new combat helicopters and aircraft (fuelled by Iranian oil) with which it bombs villages in territories controlled by ethnic groups, the Burmese government has launched an offensive in the far south of the country with the aim of ‘clearing’ the territory around the port of Dawei. This is set to become the centre of a special economic zone controlled by Russia and the terminus of a land corridor linking the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Thailand – one of the solutions to the ‘Malacca Dilemma’. For China, Myanmar represents an outlet to the Indian Ocean and the terminus of a gas and oil pipeline connecting the Rakhine region on the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan. This is why the Burmese army continues to defend Sittwe and Kyaukpyu with all its might; these cities are strategic for control of the infrastructure and are under siege by forces of the Arakan Army, which is demanding independence for Rakhine. Another region of fundamental importance to China is Kachin, a source of rare earth minerals in the north-east of the country.

Finally, India: its strategic interest lies in countering Chinese dominance in the region, but also in commercial terms, through the project for a 1,360-kilometre road through Myanmar linking it to Thailand and expanding its reach into South-East Asia. This has thus drawn up a perfect map of what has been termed the ‘Geopolitics of New Realism’.

‘Calibrated rapprochement’ is, however, the term adopted by some ASEAN countries – Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam – to describe the new policy of openness towards a country prepared to sell its resources to those who do not press too hard on the ASEAN agenda. Meanwhile, Burma has become a Spoon River where the graves are destroyed, just like the villages where those buried there once lived. Whilst the perpetrators of this horror – the dead with whom one could not speak – live on like zombies, feeding on new victims.